Tan 150
“I remember this ability of my mother’s, because now she is visiting my husband and me in the house we just bought in Woodside. And I wonder what she will see"
Tan 150
"they would also never believe that our problems are are much, much deeper … , so deep I don’t even know where the bottom is."
Tan 151
"My mother had looked in my rice bowl and told me I would marry a bad man."
Tan 153
"I saw what I had to do so I would not have to marry Arnold.” Specifically this is talking about the way Lena did not eat her food on the suspicion that it would kill Arnold from leprosy.
Tan 153
”I had stopped eating, not because of Arnold, whom I had long forgotten, but to be fashionably anorexic like all the other thirteen-year-old girls who were dieting and finding other ways to suffer as teenagers."
Tan 154
"I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.” Could connect to talking and not being passive?
Tan 155
”Harlold and I work at the same architectural firm … Only Harold Livotny is a partner and I am an associate."
Tan 156
"Of course, Harold and I are equals, in many respects."
Tan 167
"‘you could help me out if you moved in with me. I mean, that way I could use the five hundred dollars’ rent you paid to me’"
Tan 158
"He made it happen. But still, I remember, it was my idea."
Tan 159
"when I do think about it, how much I get paid, how hard I work, how fair Harold is to everybody except me, I get upset."
Tan 160
"Harold’s already spent over a hundred dollars more, so I’ll owe him around fifty from my checking account."
Tan 164
"I start to cry, which I know Harold hates. It always makes him uncomfortable, angry.”